Autumn Winter 2019 Menswear

Midnight Stripe
00072019

There’s a voice in the darkness, but it doesn’t have a face. It torments you. It threatens you. It gives you a deadline for your death. Only you can hear it. No one else seems to care. Wrap up warm. It’s a cold, dark world out there.

Kiko Kostadinov’s seventh collection, ‘Midnight Stripe’ explores oblique severity and optic surrealism. It centres on a faceless character — by day, he appreciates the sophistication of streamlined bias-cut tailoring, neatly cinched and perpendicularly cut. By night, his layered attired takes on a positively monstrous elegance with concealed pockets and sleeves that are mindful of sharp movement. It’s the villains, after all, that always become our style heroes.

Kostadinov takes his cue from the hysteric glamour of Doris Day in ‘Midnight Lace’ (1960). The spirit of Irene Letz, the film’s costume designer and celebrated American designer known for her use of stripes, haunts each garment. What would it look like if Letz designed menswear today, Kostadinov asks? The answer is a canon of perfectly tailored stripes in all its forms, of course. But it would also require an emphasis on easily merchandised practicality and antennae tuned to the darker nature of contemporary cinematic thrillers in today’s sinisterly turbulent times. Less MGM. More CNN.

Outerwear is a particular focus and the suspenseful old-world shapes of mid-century womenswear set the tone for the season. There are inverse-butterfly bomber jackets, cocoon shapes and swing coats that echo the essence of those halcyon days of dressmaking. Many have removable cowl collars suggestively enveloping the throat and doubling up as scarves, as well as artfully mismatched buttons. Some jackets have exterior bone-like zip darting that follows the curvature of matching trousers. A silken silver trench coat is pipped and backed in black patent leather; a chilling paean to transgressive glamour.

Elsewhere, Gaucho shirts are crafted from vertical-twill cotton in deep, dark jewel tones. PrimaLoft thermal nylons are paired with puffed-up teal tailoring. Aubergine wool lends itself to sweeping silhouettes. Inky blue and black Op Art stripes appear on sharply defined suiting, meticulously woven as one Escher-esque textile maze of cascading and converging lines. The obsessive symmetry is achieved through bias cutting, ensuring that each angle is geometrically perfect.

Gloves —a symbol of both deb-era ladylike grace and forensic crime-scenes — are panelled in silver leather, designed in collaboration with Asics. The collaboration with the Japanese performancewear extends to shoes and a capsule of Asics Apparel, most notably a cropped jade anorak and a quilted emerald performancewear bolero. The dramatic wigs, sparkling head adornments and punctuations of black fringing is a result of Kostadinov’s continuous collaboration with legendary Japanese hair artist Kamo. The high-shine penguin-tipped loafers are designed in collaboration with Camper.

Who says monsters can’t look smart?